Customer Reviews

The timeless way of building

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

``The Timeless Way of Building'' explains the idea of patterns in architecture. A pattern is a way to solve a specific problem, by bringing two conflicting forces into balance.

Here's a very simple example of a pattern. When a room has a window with a view, the window becomes a focal point: people are attracted to the window and want to look through it. The furniture in the room creates a second focal point: everyone is attracted toward whatever point the furniture aims them at (usually the center of the room or a TV). This makes people feel uncomfortable. They want to look out the window, and toward the other focus at the same time. If you rearrange the furniture, so that its focal point becomes the window, then everyone will suddenly notice that the room is much more ``comfortable''.

I applied that pattern to my own living room, by moving the TV under the window and rearranging the furniture, and I was amazed what a difference it made! That's a very simple example, and there are literally hundreds more in this book and its sequel. Simply reading them is fascinating; it will convince you that you can make your own home into something as wonderful in its own way as the Taj Mahal--which is Alexander's whole point.

In fact, the book's main idea is much more powerful than that. It applies to almost every aspect of life, not just to architecture. When a situation makes us unhappy, it is usually because we have two conflicting goals, and we aren't balancing them properly. Alexander's idea is to identify those ``conflicting forces'', and then find a solution which brings them into harmony. It's a simple concept, but once you appreciate it you realize how deep it really is.

This is definitely one of the best books on my shelf. It has really changed the way I look at...everything.

I come to this book as a designer, as a technology professional, as a manager, and as a person who has always been interested in gaining an understanding of the patterns and systems governing our universe.

The book is organized into three sections, I'll summarize each of them for you.

The Quality

The author postulates a Quality without a Name. "The fact that this quality cannot be named does not mean that it is vague or imprecise... I shall try to show you now, why words can never capture it, by circling around it, through the medium of a half a dozen words." These words are "Alive" "Whole" "Comfortable" "Free" "Exact" "Egoless" "Eternal." The Quality is related to yet is none of those things.

My take on this section is that this Quality Without a Name is very sort of touchy feely. It seems to boil down to trusting your emotions - if something feels good it is good.

The Gate

In the introduction the author says that there is only one way of building. "There is one timeless way of building... It is... powerful and fundamental... And there is no other way in which a building or a town which lives can possibly be made." The author states that because architects and city planners are removed from the community, unlike the way people once built things, that we've lost this way, this language.

He then proposes a Pattern Language, which is the heart of the book (In my humble opinion). A Pattern is a way to identify, build, and share this precies way of making buildings and towns that are alive.

"... every pattern we define must be formulated in the form of a rule which establishes a relationship between a context, a system of forces which arises in that context, and a configuration which allows these forces to resolve themselves in that context.

"It has the following generic form:

Context -> System of forces -> Configuration."

If you can define a context, problem, and solution, you have a pattern that can be used to build something, and can be shared by other people.

You get to this definition by thinking of a place that is alive, that's comfortable, and focusing on the geography, on the space. What makes it so good? What is the need that this place fills? This is always hard to do: going from the general to the specific or the specific to the general requires a mental leap, and the author provides a some examples of how to do this. How to determine if something has this "Quality Without a Name."

Every complex thing (like a flower) is made up of many simple things that are self-sustaining. Any non-sustaining system within the whole will bring the whole down.

This is true of buildings and places as well. "Half Hidden Garden", for example, may be made up of "Courtyards Which Live" "Garden Growing Wild" "Terraced Slope" "Fruit Trees" "Sunny Place," etc. You shouldn't even begin to design until you have a complete picture of what the garden will be like by filling in all of the details.

This section, I believe, inspired Object Oriented Programming. A "Sunny Place" can be used in other "Half Hidden Gardens" or in an entirely different structure, like a Park.

The Way

I decided to skim this section, so my summary here will probably miss a few important points. I may go back and read it in more depth at a later date.

Here he describes how the language can live, like a genetic code - picked up and modified by people over time so that multiple languages can evolve. He also describes how to put the pattern into action.

The idea of a Pattern Language appeals to me, and I like many of the concepts the book puts forward, however I found his tone to be self-congradulatory, and he didn't seem to put much stock in his reader. The tone was very much "My idea is revolutionary, and you must be prepared to recieve it."

Many of his arguments are put forth poorly. Either he doesn't describe his premise well, or the logic itself seems flawed. For example, he says that this process is both precise and based on feelings. Reading the book this seems contradictory, but upon later reflection it makes sense. It was just stated poorly. What he's proposing is a way of defining, or pinning down, what about a place makes it feel good. A specific process to define why a you like something, and formula for communicating it.

Overall, I felt he could've been a LOT more concise and either made the book smaller, or packed a lot more useful information in. It felt very much like a first draft, and that he was still working through his ideas and not quite prepared to communicate them effectively. Several of the other reviews of this book seem to miss the point, and I take that as further indication that the author was struggling to get his ideas across.

The author believes that getting an overview of his concepts is more important than the details, so he arranged the book so you can read the "headlines" quickly to get an overview. For me this was distracting because he changes voice for every paragraph, and the book loses it's narrative flow.

I give this book five stars for content, but remove one for the way it was communicated. I suggest it to anyone who is interested in developing a system (these ideas apply to much more than architecture), a taxonomy, a structure, or those with a purely academic interest in the author's ideas. I'm actually anxious to put some of them to use.

The second book in this series is called A Pattern Language, and it's 230 or so patterns, ranging from Region to Town to Sunny Area. The third book is The Oregon Experiment, which I believe chronicles the building of a school based on these principles.

This book will overwhelm the uninitiated reader with its sheer volume of information and organization. Getting the most from this book requires understanding its underpinnings -- else it is a giant list of stuff.

Those underpinnings are in Alexander's book "Notes on Synthesis and Form" Unfortunately from an Amazon perspective the Author's middle initial is in that citation, so it does not show up here. Christopher W. Alexander's Notes on Synthesis and form makes all of the follow-on books understandable and more useful to you.

The additional time and money for this work are well worth it.

This book is maybe more popular with computer guys than with architecture people, but it's applicable to all sorts of fields. It's about how you construct a design given a problem and a set of forces acting upon it. I have long worked this way in computing, but since reading the book I have been applying the same techniques to designing the garden in my back yard. I'm sure there's lots more I need to know about design, but I am feeling inspired and confident.

I am a software development consultant and trainer specializing in design patterns (to give you some perspective). Design patterns are the translation of Christopher's work to software development and involves finding recurring patterns in software development (forgive me for the oversimplified definition). This book has given me incredible insights into building software in ways previously beyond my skills. However, to be honest, I think I may appreciate the esthetics of the book even more. It is so enjoyable to read. I recommend this book to my students, associates and friends all the time and I get many, many "thank you"s for doing so. A note about reading it. Christopher recommends reading the italicized sections if you don't have time to read the whole book as opposed to just reading the first few chapters. This gives you a sense of the entire book as opposed to only the first few chapters in detail. I suggest reading the book through this way first anyway (italicized sections only), and then going back and reading the entire thing. It will take a couple of hours, but then when you go back and read it normally, you will understand and enjoy it much better.

I bought this book because i am about to build a house. Coincidentally, i am also a senior software engineer and very familiar with design patterns in my field - i use them every day. They work very well for programming computers.

This book, however, literally takes the concept of living patterns to architecture, and, by extension of the act of creation, to life itself.

At the same time as being a great philosophical read, it's also a handy guide to building a house. Bonus points for the author: The book can be read in 15 minutes (reading the "detailed table of contents"), in one hour (reading only the headlines), or in the full. These modes of reading the book come from the author's emphasis of the whole over the parts, e.g. the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

I am not entirely sure that, as the author promises, i will now be able to go and build a house, without drawing a plan... but that this idealistic goal is in practice hard to attain does not make the incredibly deep insights in this book any less true or any less practical.

Like another reader said - the book changed the way i think about... everything!

Patterns as described in this book are far more refined than anything we use in computer science, and that he sees them in a much broader light. The central grandiose idea is the one of complete interconnectedness of the patterns - the whole, which is more than the sum of its parts.

Alexander's "A Timeless Way of Building" is a philosophical treatise which has informed my thinking profoundly. Without any formal training or interest in architecture, per se, this book has opened a world of awe for me. Awe of language, of systems, of people. It almost reads as a spiritual text - but with the credibility afforded only to those who clearly address specific content (architecture and city planning, in this case). Alexander's writing is clean and precise. His ideas are powerful, they are more true today than in '79 and in more domains than architecture. I recommend this to anyone who is curious about how systems work.

This book should really be read twice.

It is one of the most powerful books that I have ever read.
It is poetic, and yet very precise and concrete, about the state of things as one perceives them in nature.

First he explains what is the Quality without a Name. Then he proceeds to distinguish it in our acts of construction by highlighting it in nature.

I have to confess that I am currently biased by General Systems Theory, Emergence and all these relatively new concepts, and cannot help but analyze this book from that perspective. It is a wonderful book that talks about stability in natural systems, and how this very beautiful and poetic stability is reached through natural processes. Nature has a way of 'stabilizing' its own systems. Nature itself is constantly changing in order to cope with this ever changing conditions.
The author assumes heavily that human beings, when letting themselves be free and at peace, are able to identify at the most profound levels with stable systems in nature. Everything nature does awakens our natural and hidden intuitions of beauty and stability, and it is at this moment, when we 'let go' of thoughts and ideas, that this beauty can be apprehended and completely acknowledged, making us whole, and by doing so, becoming a part of the Place as much as the place becomes a part of us.

The proposed way of building mimics, to the extent this is possible, nature's way of building, and constructs things in the world organically, this is, build them as if they were being generated from a seed, not "composed".
One starts with the very basics On Site, and lets go its preconceived ideas and images, and focuses only in the site, and in the specifics of the site: paths the Sun light travels, trees nearby, roads, accidents in the ground, previous buildings and, most importantly, the use that will be given to the building by those that will actually use it. This way, whatever the end results, the building thus created is constantly able to adapt to its surroundings, being able, through specific applications of the patterns proposed, to resolve the ever changing systems of conflicting forces which are constantly found as development progresses.

It is a truly beautiful book, even if you have no business in architecture, as is my case (Software Engineer). I can see how and why this book had such a tremendous impact on Software Development when it came out. However, this book actually goes much beyond the ideas in design and enterprise architecture patterns. It is a book for your heart. It is a book that will definitely change the way you face the world, the way you let yourself be in places, the fact that a building is much more than the geometries and materials used to build it.

A book everyone should read. Really everyone.

This book needs plenty of reading, as it is full of ideas and images that slowly come together to form a whole. It describes "the quality with no name" that make some buildings come "alive" and be wonderful to live in. It is this same quality that makes nature so appealing. The quality is formed from patterns - the second book in the trilogy "A Pattern Language" describes a large number of patterns for architecture in detail.

It is my current opinion that when the "quality without a name" is present in a human relationship it is called "love". If I am right, then in a way this book answers the eternal question "what is love?". Powerful eh?

[I discovered this book following a recommendation of "A Pattern Language" on an object-oriented computing course. The power of patterns in computer software is only starting to be realised]

It is amazing how a book that propounds revolutionary architectural theory has stirred up the computer software industry. This deeply philosophical book, which is very practical and rigorous, lays the foundation for developing "pattern languages".

The book is all about a common language that can be shared to build artifacts that are alive. It stresses that a design should always concentrate on the "whole" and not on assembling parts. It also shows the power of distributed processing, if you will, as against centralized processing.

All the great principles have one thing in common. They are simple. And, after one realizes such a simple but profound principle, one can not stop wondering how one survived without it's knowledge. This book gives that feeling. If you are involved in architecture of any sort- buildings, software, organization or even politics- this book is a must for you.